Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Rossetti, William Michael
ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL (1829–1919), man of letters and art-critic, the second son and third child of Gabriele Rossetti, and brother of Christina Georgina Rossetti [q.v.] and Dante Gabriel Rossetti [q.v.], was born in London at 38 Charlotte Street (now Hallam Street), Portland Place, 25 September 1829, and educated with his brother at King's College School, London. In 1845 he entered the Excise Office (which became later the Inland Revenue Board), where he remained till his retirement in 1894, having attained (in 1869) the position of senior assistant secretary. From 1888 he acted as referee, for estate duty, of pictures and drawings, and he continued to hold this position till about 1905, after his retirement.
William Rossetti was the companion in boyhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his lifelong confidant, and to him were dedicated the Poems of 1870, ‘to so many of which, so many years back, he gave the first brotherly hearing’. But after boyhood and his youthful share in the ‘pre-Raphaelite’ movement, William Rossetti showed a marked intellectual detachment from all his family. He was one of the seven pre-Raphaelite ‘brothers’ and even made some slight practice of painting. He edited The Germ (1850), the organ of the brotherhood, and wrote the sonnet printed on the cover of each of its four issues; in it he reviewed Clough's Bothie and Matthew Arnold's Strayed Reveller. During the following years he wrote art-criticisms for the Spectator and other papers, and republished them, revised, under the title Fine Art, chiefly Contemporary (1867). At a later date he contributed articles on art to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
On the death of his brother's wife in 1862, Rossetti joined his brother, Algernon Charles Swinburne [q.v.], and George Meredith [q.v.], in a short experiment in combined housekeeping at Tudor House, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. He published a discriminating defence in pamphlet-form of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) and jointly with him, wrote Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition (1868); to him Swinburne dedicated his essay on William Blake (1868). With his brother he had assisted Anne Gilchrist [q.v.] to edit her husband's Life of Blake in 1863. William Rossetti shared the republican and anti-ecclesiastical opinions of Swinburne and, in 1881, had in preparation a volume of Democratic Sonnets, but their revolutionary sentiments alarmed Dante Gabriel, who feared for his brother's dismissal from the civil service, and they were withheld from publication till 1907.
From 1870 to 1873 Rossetti edited Edward Moxon's series of popular poets, reprinting the introductions in Lives of Some Famous Poets (1878). A review of this is included in Swinburne's Miscellanies. He introduced Walt Whitman to the British public in a volume of selections (1868). In 1870 he issued an edition of Shelley in two volumes (revised edition, 3 vols., 1878), and in 1874 an edition of Blake in the ‘Aldine Poets’ series. He was an active member of the Shelley Society, founded in 1886, and contributed papers afterwards privately printed. In 1887 he wrote a Life of Keats for the ‘Great Writers’ series.
The deaths of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1882 and Christina Rossetti in 1894 gave William Rossetti scope for that biographical and editorial work by which he will be best remembered. Editions by him of his brother's collected works appeared in 1886, 1891, 1904, and 1911, as well as various critical studies; but it was only after waiting in vain for thirteen years for the promised biography of his brother by Theodore Watts-Dunton [q.v.], that Rossetti set about the Memoir, with Family-Letters (2 vols., 1895). His services to Christina Rossetti are the editions of New Poems (1896), Collected Poems, with a memoir (1904), and Family-Letters (1908). He also published a blank-verse translation (1901) of his father's Italian ‘versified autobiography’. It is not necessary to share either his sense of his brother's importance or his careful detachment from his sister's religion to find his loyalty and candour admirable, and his detachment amusing, in no derisive sense. He suppressed nothing but what the rights of the living demanded, and he was scrupulously just.
He followed the tradition of his family's devotion to Dante by a blank-verse translation (1865) of the Inferno, by the translation of the prose-arguments in his brother's version (1861) of the Vita Nuova, and by a study of Dante and his Convito, with translations (1910). In 1891 he delivered the Taylorian lecture at Oxford, on Leopardi. He was amongst the earliest workers on the Oxford English Dictionary; he edited certain texts (1866, 1869) for the Early English Text Society, and for the Chaucer Society a comparison of Troilus and Criseyde with Boccaccio's Filostrato (2 parts, 1875, 1883).
In 1874 Rossetti married Emma Lucy [see Rossetti, Lucy Madox], daughter of Ford Madox Brown [q.v.], and by her he had two sons and three daughters. He died at 3 St. Edmund's Terrace, Primrose Hill, 5 February 1919. His wife predeceased him in 1894.
A portrait in oils (1864) by A. Legros is reproduced in Rossetti's Some Reminiscences, vol. i (1906), and a pencil-drawing (c 1846–1848), by D. G. Rossetti, in the Family-Letters of D. G. Rossetti, vol. ii.
[The Times, 6 February 1919; British Museum Catalogue; private information.]